He eased up slightly and leaned his forehead against hers so that, even in the dark, she could see the intense gleam of conviction in his eyes. “Nobody’s going to hurt you, sweetheart. I promise.”
His words settled deep within her, spurring her arms to circle his shoulders as she burrowed her face in his throat. He shifted them on their sides, slid a leg between her thighs, linking them together, and pulled her into him as Quinn trembled with full body shivers.
She was taking this. She needed this. She could pull up her bitch pants and lace up her shit-stomping boots later. Right now, she was hiding out in Jasper’s strong and more than capable arms.
God, she loved his arms.
She could barely believe he was here.
Hang on. Jasper was here.
She reared back and smacked his shoulder. “Are you crazy?!”
His resigned exhale feathered her hair. “Knew that was too good to last.”
“What in the world made you think it was a good idea to break into my apartment and lie in wait for me?! Wait, scratch that. What in the holy hell are you doing here?!”
His hold on her tightened, something she hadn’t thought possible. “I told you we weren’t finished.”
She smacked him again. “You scared the shit out of me!”
“Quinn…”
“Don’t you ‘Quinn’ me in that tone of voice, Jasper McQueen! I am not one of your soldiers. I do not jump when you say so and ask how high on the way up.”
“We’re sailors, not soldiers. And no, you jump into my arms the second I touch you.”
“I do not.”
“You practically burrowed under me.”
She snorted. “Don’t flatter yourself.”
“Don’t have to when you do shit like that.”
“Cocky.”
Quinn gasped when he grinded his rock-hard thigh between her legs.
“Yeah, but you like me that way.” Wry amusement tinted his voice.
“I can’t believe you’re getting off on this.” She pushed to get free, and when that didn’t budge him, reached back to pry his hands off. He snatched hers up and gave them a squeeze.
“Baby, I got you squirming under me, no training in the world is gonna keep me soft.”
“I thought you were here to kill me!”
His jaw hardened. Any hint of amusement was gone when he replied, “Yeah, let’s talk about that.”
Like that was going to happen. “Not on your life,” she vowed.
“It’s your life I’m worried about. And don’t bother bullshitting me. You’re as worried as I am, and I know this because you told me.”
Dammit, that was true. She’d been so relieved it was Jasper in her room and not Thug One or Thug Two (or someone worse), she’d nearly told him everything.
Score one for subconscious self-preservation.
“Let me go,” she demanded.
“You gave that to me,” Jasper reminded her unnecessarily, ignoring her demand. “And I don’t care if you were scared outta your mind when you did. Finally, you’re telling me some truth, and now you’re going to give me the rest of it.”
That raised her hackles again. “Why? Because you say so?”
“Yes!” he roared, ratcheting from zero to sixty in a scorching hot minute. “I have some fucking significant experience with this shit, Quinn. Maybe, for a change, you could follow my goddamn lead!”
“I’ve followed enough for one lifetime and have been doing fine without you since I stopped doing that.” That was more of a lie than she’d like to admit, but she sure as hell wasn’t adding that to her list of confessions.
“Sure. You did so fine without me, how come, a second ago, you were begging me not to kill you?”
Crap, he had her there too. “We’ve been through this already. It’s none of your business.”
“Yeah, we’ve been through this already, but you don’t seem to be getting a clue.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Excuse me?”
He shook her by the shoulders and didn’t bother to be gentle about it. “Who are you so afraid of, Quinn?”
The moment her eyeballs settled back in their sockets, Quinn reared up into his face and carefully enunciated, “It’s none. Of. Your. Business.”
“God damn it,” he growled and then his mouth was on hers, and her tongue was against his, and she sank back into his heat and the flavor that was only ever Jasper. Her fingers dug into his shirt where it pulled across his back. The leather straps of his holster dragged against the tops of her breasts. She whimpered as her nipples raised up against the friction.
Quinn lifted her outside leg and hooked it over his hip. She dug her heel into the small of his back and used it as leverage to push up and get even closer, so close, his eyelashes brushed her nose when he lifted up and repositioned his mouth to take hers again, rough and deep and wet and, God, it was Jasper, and she couldn’t get enough, she would never get enough of him.
His fingers plunged into her hair to drag her head back as though he couldn’t stop their kiss under his own power. “Fine,” he said in a gravelly voice that shot vibrations through her sex. “Keep your secrets. I only came here to fuck you.”
And like that, all her desire for him went poof, as though she’d been doused in cold water. Jasper never spoke to her that way—he never spoke to anyone that way, at least not when she’d been around to hear. Shock locked up her frame. “Wha—?” she barely managed. “What did you say to me?”
“You heard me.” He bent to kiss her again; she shoved a blocking hand between their mouths.
“You are out of your mind if you think you can say that and expect me to keep on keeping on. How dare you!”
His grip on her hair bordered on uncomfortable. “I dare, Quinn. I’ll dare anything until you tell me what I want to know. If that means I have to fuck it outta you—” He shrugged. “I’ve done far worse to get intel.”
She didn’t want to think about what that “worse” might entail. “You are such a son of a bitch,” she hissed. “Get off me!”
Instead he rolled them so he was on top again, which Quinn felt was a clear enough, if unacceptable, answer. “Don’t bother pretending I’m alone in this. A year apart hasn’t done jack to weaken what’s between us. If anything, it’s made it stronger.
“You might not want me here, and you might not want to admit you need my help,” and here his hand dipped from her back to slide over her hardened nipple. “But you sure as hell want me in your body, and baby, you don’t have to ask twice.”
“I didn’t ask at all! You jumped me when I walked in the door!”
“I waited for you! Again! Jesus, so fucking stupid, I waited for you, again. Once McBain cut us loose for the night, I headed back to Junonia to talk to you, just talk, Quinn, because I can’t stand that I haven’t known where you’ve been for a whole fucking year. And then, suddenly, you’re here the same goddamn weekend I am, and scared to death someone is coming to kill you and you still—won’t—fucking—talk to me!”
He lurched off her and was at the door before she caught up. The instinct to go after him was too strong to question, even after what he’d said and done. He couldn’t leave, not like this. Not after what she’d seen in his face.
Quinn wrapped her arms around his waist, knowing there was no way she could hold him back if he was set on going, only sure that there was something very, very important here that she would lose forever if he walked out that door.
She wouldn’t be able to bear that. Not again.
He jerked once in her hold, his hands coming to hers to set them aside.
“Jasper,” she whispered.
His head slumped forward, chin to chest, but at least he’d stopped moving.
“The bar was dark when I got there,” he continued as though he’d never stopped. “And you were gone a-fucking-gain. So, I interrupted McBain gettin’ it on with his wife, and once he was done deciding whether or not to kill me for it, he explained who I was to his wife.
She told me you’d shacked up here at Hibiscus Court.” His hands tightened on hers, silently communicating how he felt about her new digs. “I hotwired one of the resort’s cars and shot over here, and when your car wasn’t in the lot, I broke in to wait for you. Again.”
Quinn rested her forehead in the groove between his shoulder blades. “You did all that so you could fuck me?”
“Jesus, Quinn, no.” He spun around, so quick, always so swift and able, that now her forehead rested on his cut pec. His arms slid back around her waist, and she couldn’t stop the soul deep sigh that escaped her lips. They’d always fit together like this, as if the detailed grooves and hard planes of his body were made expressly to accommodate the soft curves and lush valleys of hers, and she’d been so empty without him all year.
“I did it all to find you.” He titled her head up and kissed her with a painful tenderness. “I’ve missed you, babe,” he admitted, mouth hovering over hers, so close she could taste the words. His lips coasted up and over the curve of her cheek to buss her temple. “More than you could ever know.”
Her heart shattered and its pieces crackled in her voice when she murmured, “Honey,” and gripped the sides of his neck to pull him back down to her. “I missed you too.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Wine comes in at the mouth
And love comes in at the eye;
That’s all we shall know for truth
Before we grow old and die.
I lift the glass to my mouth,
I look at you, and I sigh.
—W.B. Yeats
I missed you too.
Not since he’d received his trident had four words meant so much to Jasper.
“Quinn,” he said but she kissed him before he’d finished her name. He expected the push and pull of her usual aggression, couldn’t wait to suit up for that hot battle again, but she surprised him, licking her bottom lip so her tongue slipped sweetly against his, teasing him with a taste of her. He groaned and felt her lips tip up before he took over, kissing her deep and wet and long as he lifted her off her feet and backed her up. He put a knee in the bed to lower her back down to the mattress, back again beneath him, all the while kissing her like he’d never get enough.
He’d been wrong earlier. This first time, they were going to take it slow after all.
His mouth trailed down over her chin to nip playfully at her throat. He chuckled low when her breath stuttered over an exhale. “You always were sensitive here,” he remembered.
She swallowed hard. “Not only there.”
He shifted down to the valley formed by the opened buttons of her top. “Here too,” he agreed, brushing his mouth over the mounds of her breasts that plumped up out of her bra. Swiftly, he unfastened the remaining buttons until he could spread the panels of her tuxedo shirt wide.
Beautiful.
He slipped his hands to the middle of her back to arch her up like an offering so he could tug her bra aside with his teeth. Her neck stretched back on the pillows and she moaned deep and long when his mouth engulfed her nipple.
It was better than any memory. She was better than any dream, even the ones he’d had of her, and boy, had he dreamed of Quinn. Hot, filthy, body-draining dreams that’d woke him in the middle of the night with so rigid an erection, even jacking off couldn’t ease the pain.
As always, Quinn was game for it. Greedy hands roamed up and down from his skull to his back to his waist, every inch she could reach while he paid homage to her breasts. “Here, baby,” she coaxed, pulling down the left side of her bra. His eyes flickered up to meet hers, hot and hungry with demand. He released her nipple and rolled it between his fingers, leaning over to suck the other one deep. “Jasper,” she moaned, her legs shifting and tangling with his, restless with need.
He ducked his head to drag his mouth down her belly and over that strip of skin she’d left bare for any man to see. “This has been driving me crazy all night,” he admitted hoarsely. “Knowing every guy who saw you wanted his mouth right here. But only so he could get it here,” and he slipped a finger past the band on her trousers and between her legs.
“Jasper!”
“Right here, baby.” He unbuckled her belt and had her jeans and panties down and off in the next second. Jasper paused for a moment to take in the vision sprawled out before him. Her tits were propped up on display for him, her legs spread wide so he could see her wet with want for him.
“Christ, you’re gonna go already, aren’t you?”
Frantic, she shook her head against the pillow, but pushed her pussy into his palm. “No,” she lied. “I don’t want it to end so soon.”
“If it does, we’ll start it up again.” And with that, he crawled between her legs and put his mouth on her.
If her kiss was narcotic, then the taste of her pussy was the nectar of gods. Nothing compared. Not the first beer after a successful mission. Not his first bite of real food after days of living off MREs.
She shrieked on contact and again when he sucked on her clit. She ground her pelvis into his mouth and her fingers into his skull, clutching him to her as though afraid he might stop. But he had no intention of stopping and licked and sucked and ate at her until the first orgasm ripped her apart.
He knifed up as she came down, tearing at the release to his shoulder holster and setting it and his weapon on the night stand seconds before a rousing Quinn yanked his shirt out of his pants and up without bothering to unbutton it. He raised his arms to help her and then reached for his wallet while she went after his buckle, pulled down his fly, and freed him.
“Quinn,” he groaned when her hand wrapped him up. Her thumb cruised over the weeping tip, and Jasper’s head dropped back. “I want your mouth,” he growled, but when he felt her breath on his flesh, he snapped up and pushed her back into the bed. “But I want that pussy more.”
“Oh my God, yes,” she moaned, notching her legs into the groove of his hips. “Now, Jasp. I need your cock now.”
She’d just come and already needed it again. She was a marvel, and tonight, right now, she was his.
His again.
“You’re gonna get it, baby. Put this on me first.” He pressed the condom wrapper in her hand before his fingers skated up her arm. “I’d forgotten how soft your skin is.”
She didn’t reply. It took another moment for him to realize she wasn’t gloving him up.
“Quinn?”
She glanced up through her eyelashes with uncharacteristic hesitation that sent a bolt of apprehension coursing through him.
“I’m on the pill,” she quietly reminded him. “And there’s been no one since you.”
He felt her words like a blow to the gut, and God, God, the sweetness of her gift nearly unmanned him.
He gave it back as he shoved his pants off, shifted up, notch himself in place against her, and slid inside, bare as the day he was born. “No one since you, sweetheart,” he promised, and she finally wrapped him up in her arms and her legs and took him deep in her body until there was no space left between them.
“Kiss me,” she demanded. He ducked his head to comply while pulling out so he could thrust right back into her.
Christ, she was so snug around him, he almost lost it on the second go. She pulsed against him, and he took the cue and thrust out and in again, quickly building to a rhythm that had her clawing his back and making familiar noises of frustrated need in her throat.
“Wildcat,” he praised. Jasper lifted his chest to watch it come over her so he’d have that memory to relive when she was no longer around for him to fuck. She took that as invitation to bite his nipple, which quickly sent him right to the edge. “Hurry up, wildcat,” he urged, thumbing her clit, but she was already there, the spasms of her orgasm clenching down on his dick until he shouted her name and lost his rhythm, plunging and thrusting until he shot deep inside her.
Spent, he kept moving, easing them both back from bliss as he searched and found her mouth with his. “My wildcat,” he m
urmured against her lips, shoving in her one last time to stay put. “My wild lady.”
Mine.
* * *
“What is that God-awful noise?”
As strangely as it had begun, the piercing beep slicing through the sleepy fog in Quinn’s head stopped. An arm clutched her waist and then released. Cold rushed in at her back as the warm body that’d been curved around hers all night rolled out of the bed. She murmured sleepily when the sheet was pulled up and around her. A body dropped to the floor, and Quinn heard the once familiar sounds of Jasper’s morning routine pepper the air.
She cracked her eyes enough to make out the alarm clock across the room. “It should be illegal to be awake at such an ungodly hour of the morning.”
“Unless you stay up for it, right?”
She didn’t have to look to know he was grinning.
“That’s something else entirely,” she groused, snuggling back into the fluffy pillow.
“It always is.”
He went back to manly grunting his way through what she rightly guessed was a regimen of sit ups.
Back when they’d been married, they’d done this almost on a daily basis, or at least on those mornings Jasper was home. He needed far less sleep than she, especially if she was working into the wee hours, and too many years in the armed services had made the concept of “sleeping in” an anathema. He’d wake, she’d complain without meaning it, and he’d do his first group of calisthenics there in the bedroom while she kept sleepy watch.
Quinn had loved those mornings. Loved having that private pocket of time with Jasper before his world intruded and dragged him away from her. She adored watching his strong, mouthwatering body work through the exercises that kept him that way. She thrilled at the knowledge that he’d use that strength and ability to defend and shelter their nation and to shower her with protection and pleasure every chance he got. And she loved that he let her see this, this immense physical and mental strength, but more in those rare moments when he let her catch a glimpse of the rare vulnerability he kept carefully locked away. The fear that he’d fail his men. The worry that he wouldn’t bring them all home; the rage and sorrow when he didn’t.
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